The 20 year trend was a conservative estimate. I've said before that it took nearly one hundred years to go from the first production of a few grams of liquid helium to thousands of tons, and hundreds of millions of tons of liquid nitrogen and oxygen. Similar mass-production techniques will be developed for BECs and BCSs, and probably take about 20 years.

Known ones? Any quantum mechanical device you care to name, semiconductors, diodes, batteries, transistors, etc. The three benefits are superconductivity, superfluidity, and coherence. Nanofabrication? Quantum computers? Optical lattices? Spintronics? What do they use lasers for now? All those apps, but with matter lasers, stuff like that. My comparison is, again, the driver of the 20th century: refrigeration. Where once liquified gases were a lab curiosity, now are used from chilled superconducting magnets, fabrication ranging from steel production to chip production. Coherent matter waves and

hmmm..., clearly a neat area for speculative research, but there don't appear to be any advanced theoretical applications on the back burner. Take for example, the business of acoustic refrigeration, and/or magnetic resonance propulsion, sonoluminesence, etc..., phenomena known and studied for 30-40 years, for which there are definite applications, like friction suppression and thrust in hypersonic craft (magnetic resonance propulsion)

I think the phenomenon itself is so new, and the possibilities so broad, that applications will probably be forthcoming on a much longer timeline.

About Me

The term "random walk" is attributed to Karl Pearson, through a 1905 letter exchange in the journal Nature. It describes the path of a hypothetical drunkard. Since I hardly ever drink, I suppose that description fits me as well as any other. Other than that, I'm a well-muscled, good-looking, middle-aged, no-nonsense Northern Barbarian type that would just as soon put you to work as say "Hello" to you. So, Hello there! Now get back to work!